


mute.

by themissinglenk



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: M/M, from tumblr, prompts, weird au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-12
Updated: 2013-11-12
Packaged: 2018-01-01 06:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1041577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themissinglenk/pseuds/themissinglenk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren Jäger drew pictures of monsters, but he wouldn’t talk. // from tumblr, open prompts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	mute.

Eren Jäger drew pictures of monsters, but he wouldn’t talk.

 _Post-traumatic stress disorder_ , they said. _Selective mutism_. Said it had something to do with anxiety, and trauma, and the amygdala, where the _fight-or-flight_ response was triggered, and sent seemingly healthy (and moderately medicated) silent young men into fits of feral madness, kicking and punching and clawing and growling and screaming with an uneven raspy voice like all the feeling of pent-up words had to be released somehow, and in a passionate roar or two that echoed through the too-white hallways of the place. _Emotional dysregulation_ … they also said.

So Eren sat around the campus of St. Sina’s with his papers and pens and the thousand-yard stare, or the ghost expressions of maladaptive daydreams, or scowling wordlessly at all who dared pass by his line of vision with those narrowed eyes—haunted, tortured, sparking eyes, eyes that seemingly saw all the darkest secrets and tragedies but without his voice he could not, would not, tattle.

The funny thing about selective mutism was that he decided when he wanted to say things, in all actuality. _Couldn’t_ and _can’t_ were tricky words; and somewhere deep down there in that abysmal silent stare was the ability. But Eren couldn’t seem to find it without getting lost.

Levi should have been committed to St. Sina’s, he decided after his first few visits, smoking in the courtyard with Erwin. Striking the match for him, and shielding it from the sweet English breeze as he held it to his comrade’s American cigarette. Yes, he should have been committed, too, because more often than not he felt mad as mittens—on a good day, anyway—and he had a hard time believing the war was finally over and he had a harder time believing it had happened at all and he had the hardest time yet understanding why some men broke under the weight of the horrors when that was just how the world was. Had they never realized that before? Or was Levi a monster of a man?

Smelled like the sea down here, just a few kilometers from the southern bluffs. People had Welsh accents here, all the nurses and maids at least. And the campus was a colorful circus of the more healthy refugees—not the shell-shocked or malnourished, plucked from German camps and cities bombed as trenches, the masses flooding to and fro with their collective war-torn stories—but the ones with the spiritual disorders like men favoring men or women favoring women, or the soldiers like Erwin who were otherwise sane and recovering well in the head, but were having a hard time adjusting to phantom-limb syndrome. Or the ones like Eren who hadn’t seen the war apart from air raid sirens and ration cards, and suspicious aircraft passing by overhead in the endless country-blue sky, and bullies in the yard who heard the name _J_ _äger_ and instantly retaliated. The ones like Eren who had killed three men in self-defense before thirteen, a mute and traumatized orphan with nowhere else to go as the world turned to shepherd the other lost sheep of the war.

Eren followed Erwin around like a lost puppy, with his papers and pens, and the wind tossing his hair in and out of his face, staring with that expressionless flare, and when Levi sat in the courtyard visiting with Erwin and talking girls and sex and marriage and the secrets of sharing a bunk in the war, Eren was not too far away gawking. Scribbling. Gesturing, laughing silently to himself. Waiting for Levi to head out so he could follow him conspicuously all through the courtyard, a little fucking duckling.

“Does he worship you or something?” Levi asked Erwin one afternoon, when the rain kept everyone inside and the west patient lounge was full of voices and movement, and Levi was at the piano playing idly one of Erwin’s favorite Chopin pieces for him. He couldn’t, after all, play it himself anymore.

“I don’t know why he would,” Erwin grunted. “But I’ve been wondering if it wasn’t _you_ he’s most interested in. Nobody else’s friends and family visit as much as you.”

Ah, Levi was going to hell.

Eren wouldn’t talk to the doctors, no matter how hard he tried—choking on his tongue, flinging his hands around, shattering into frustrated tears and violent groans because he’d failed, again. No other patients really wanted to befriend him. The nurses were, guiltily, terrified of him.

But Eren spoke to Levi.

Twice. Just twice.

The first time, when he’d approached Erwin and Levi in the courtyard with a picture he’d drawn of monsters eating people, and whispered thin and rattling as the last leaf on a tree in the fall: “‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.’”

Erwin had laughed and laughed, and nudged Levi with his missing elbow, and said around his cigarette, “Levi, my friend, you have got it bad. Worse than you ever had before. And I thought your type was sailor boys! It’s all right, I’ll let Dr. Pixis know they should stop medicating that brat and just let you into his room because _then_ he’ll talk, apparently—”

“Go to hell,” Levi had seethed, but really it was nice to see Erwin honestly laughing again and it pained him to watch Eren wander away, but he folded the picture of people-eating up and put in the pocket next to his heart and stole Erwin’s cigarette to finish himself because it wasn’t very hard to steal from a one-armed man.

“Glad to see you haven’t changed one bit,” Erwin whispered.

Eren spoke again when Levi had him up against the wall in the Rose Hall stairwell, outside the library, and found out he was a little bit taller, and a little less scrawny than previously gauged, and he shivered at Levi’s touch in the most erotic way, and his fingers were fisted so tight in Levi’s sweater that they shook, they really shook, and his hips rolled forward and he gritted his teeth, and with vocal chords weak from neglect he croaked, “Kiss me, God dammit—”

And so Levi did.

Ah, yes.

He really should have been committed, too. He fell for the mute the first time he saw him, and in his soul was raging a battle between good and evil, doc, because this boy who spoke more with kisses than words had taken root there and wasn’t leaving anytime soon.  
  
  
 **end.**


End file.
